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John Curtin, the leader who turned Australia to the United States

Just eight weeks into his wartime prime ministership, Labor leader John Curtin spent the weekend of December 6-7, 1941, at the unpretentious Victoria Palace Hotel in Little Collins Street, Melbourne, not far from the army's Victoria Barracks. Harold Cox, then political correspondent of The Sun News-Pictorial, remembered it was "a very dreary weekend. Nothing happened on the Saturday; nothing happened on the Sunday."

But at about 6am on Monday, December 8, Curtin's press secretary, Don Rodgers, woke him with the news that the Japanese had bombed the naval base of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. "Well it has come," Curtin responded.

Curtin knew this was a momentous event, bringing America, "the arsenal of democracy", into the war at the darkest hour for the allies. But no one, Curtin included, understood that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour – a "day of infamy," according to US President Franklin Roosevelt – also signalled the transformation of Australia including the way we, as Australians, viewed ourselves.

December 7, 1941. Japan attacks the United States and begins the realignment of power in the Pacific that continues today. AP

Over the next four months, Japan ruthlessly destroyed the myth that Britannia ruled the waves, and the US supplanted Britain as the major power among the allies in the region. An earlier Coalition wartime administration dithered and a sort of fatalistic defeatism permeated government and military circles about what Australia could do if Japan invaded. But Curtin was more clear-eyed, presciently warning as far back as 1936 that "the dependence of Australia upon the competence, let alone the readiness, of British statesmen to send forces to our aid is too dangerous a hazard upon which to found Australia's defence policy".

But by 1941, and under the prime ministership of this one-time left-wing firebrand, Australia discarded the fraying apron strings tying it to the Mother Country and looked to the US for help. More than three-quarters of a century after that fateful move, as China challenges US hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, and our once arch-enemy, Japan, forms a "Quad" of countries, including Australia, to attempt to somehow contain this tectonic shift, the US Alliance still remains the bedrock of our security policy, as yesterday's Turnbull government white paper demonstrates.

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Old protector swiftly overwhelmed

The Turnbull government is warning that China's increasing aggression over territorial disputes in the South China and East China seas, plus its democratic deficit, makes it more critical to maintain America's presence in Asia and bolster ties with neighbouring democracies. Without US political, economic and security engagement in the region, power would shift too rapidly to Beijing to Australia's detriment, the Foreign Policy White Paper says.

To fully understand the motive force behind this latest iteration of pretty much the same policy dating back more than three-quarters of a century, it's important to go back to those dark days of World War Two. Post Pearl Harbour, Japan literally blew the assumptions, verities and emotional comforts – indeed, for many, the national raison d'etre – of Australians sky high in a matter of weeks, with its rapid, devastating downward thrust into south-east Asia. This resulted in the loss of the major British naval base in Singapore – long seen as the bulwark against any invasion of Australia – the loss of other British colonies such as Malaya, collapse of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies – now Indonesia – and the Portuguese colony of East Timor, and the loss of Australian-administered Rabaul in New Guinea. Meanwhile, British defences were collapsing in Burma.

The contempt shown for Britain's much-bruited naval prowess was epitomised by Japanese torpedo bombers destroying HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse in a matter of 10 minutes off the cost of Malaya as the Japanese infantry overpowered all before it.

In response, Curtin put the nation on a total war footing and there were warnings of invasion. At the same time, he memorably wrote in the Melbourne Herald: "Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with Britain."

"War in the Pacific changed too many things, too abruptly, for Curtin to see where it would take Australia and Asia. The best Curtin and his Government could do was to find a way through each successive problem," writes John Edwards. Curtin addressing a Martin Place war loans rally in February 1942. Supplied

"We know the problems that Britain faces. We know the dangers of dispersal of strength but we know, too, that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on. We are, therefore, determined that Australia shall not go, and we shall exert all our energies towards the shaping of a plan, with the United States as its keystone, which will give to our country some confidence of being able to hold out until the tide of battle swings against the enemy."

Shock birth of modern Australia

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A few months later Curtin was hosting American troops on Australian soil as US General Douglas MacArthur took command of Allied forces rapidly building up to confront the Japanese menace in the south-west Pacific, and operating from his new Australian base. Curtin transformed federal-state relations, the tax system, manpower policies, labour mobility, female participation – also in just a matter of weeks – as more than half a million Australians joined the military, a limited form of conscription was reintroduced, and names such as Kokoda and Sandakan singed into the national memory.

This is the conceptual core of John Edwards' remarkable new book: the imperatives of the Pacific War, and John Curtin's capacity to make the right decisions quickly, forced the birth of modern Australia at breakneck speed. It was an Australia aligned with the US, a country with uniform income tax, enhanced central bank controls, greatly increased industrial capacity, and a nation finally forced to think, if not fend, for itself.

As Edwards writes: "It would not become apparent for a while, but it was not only Australia's security that was at issue. It was also the way Australians thought about themselves, their country and its place in the world. Those ideas would be changed not so much by Japan's entry into the war or by its final defeat as by its early extraordinary victories."

The studious, enigmatic (shades of Curtin?) John Edwards has been wrestling with his One Big Idea, that is, John Curtin. Curtin the myopic, at times diffident, decent but remote, retiring man, who came into his own at a time of great national crisis. Graham Tidy

"They would be changed also by Curtin's decisions during war, though he and his colleagues who supported him were themselves schooled in the thought patterns they were re-arranging and did not always foresee or welcome the changes they brought about. Very often what they would say they were doing and sometimes even what they thought they were doing would not be what they actually did, or had consequences quite other than those intended.

"War in the Pacific changed too many things, too abruptly, for Curtin to see where it would take Australia and Asia. The best Curtin and his government could do was to find a way through each successive problem. Only later would they begin to understand what they had done – to begin to understand what was enduring, what was temporary, what mattered and what did not."

The One Big Idea

When he completed this book, Edwards was more than 10 years older than Curtin was when he died – on July 5, 1945, just weeks before the Japanese surrender. Coincidentally, John Curtin's War also represents the defining moment in an extraordinary career for Edwards. Starting as a trade union researcher, his life's work has spanned writing for The Australian Financial Review, a vexed period as an adviser to Labour minister Clyde Cameron in the Whitlam Labor Government, and a short interlude on The Australian as its political correspondent. (Yes, Edwards had his "Rupert moment", and, like for many, it ended in tears.)

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There followed an extensive period on The National Times in Sydney and Washington, followed by postgraduate study of economics. This included completing a Washington-based doctorate on the operations of the US Federal Reserve when Fed boss Paul Volcker made his globe-changing decision to shrink the cancer of post-Vietnam-War inflation out of the system. Edwards followed this by more journalism, and then working as an adviser to treasurer, and later prime minister, Paul Keating.

Prime Minister John Curtin and his wife, Elsie, arrive at Parliament House mid-1940s. Supplied

This resulted in the most successful of his six books, Keating: The Inside Story, and later work as an economist with Macquarie and then HSBC. There followed appointment to the Board of the Reserve Bank and a non-resident fellowship at the Lowy Institute.

John Curtin's War represents the underlying leitmotif of Edwards' life over the past two decades. It forms a common thread for his time in politics, the academy, investment banking, retail banking, central banking and journalism.

All the while, the studious, enigmatic (shades of Curtin?) John Edwards has been wrestling with his One Big Idea, that is, John Curtin. Curtin the myopic, at times diffident, decent but remote, retiring man who often seemed to be under strain – reflected in heavy bouts of drinking, repeated illness and psoriasis – but who came into his own at a time of great national crisis.

New lease of life

This consuming, Edwards-driven, OBI partly explains what has made this a highly unusual, and unusually great, biography. It's a two-volume effort – Volume 2 has already been completed and will be published next year. In Volume 1 Edwards writes perceptively about the early Curtin years. This is a time of struggle, left-wing agitation, depression, hypochondria and bouts of alcoholism.

No one, Curtin included, understood that the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour – a "day of infamy," according to US President Franklin Roosevelt – also signalled the transformation of Australia including the way we, as Australians, viewed ourselves. Supplied

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Curtin was saved by marriage to Elsie, a largely happy family life, and what seemed, at the time, like a demotion – leaving the state secretaryship of the Timber Workers' Union in Victoria to become editor of the Westralian Worker, the weekly organ of the AWU in WA. Living near the sand dunes of Perth's Cottesloe, calmed by the Indian Ocean sea breeze, centred by walking on the beach, Curtin steadied and thrived in the West.

Curtin's intellect, political savoir faire and growing economic literacy, was augmented by his attendance at an ILO conference in Geneva. He became Labor MP for Fremantle in 1928.

After losing then rewinning the seat, Curtin became Labor leader in 1935, pared back the United Australia Party-Country Party's majority in the 1937 election, pushed the Coalition government led by Robert Menzies into minority status after the 1940 election, and moved into the PM's office when the Coalition showed it wasn't up to the wartime job.

Role model of patience and judgment

Much of the detail for the last third of the book is taken up with a fascinating account of jockeying in Canberra over wartime policy, and Curtin's at times heated and vexatious dealings with Britain's great wartime leader, Winston Churchill, and the – different, but just as extraordinary – US President Franklin Roosevelt.

It includes Curtin's momentous decision to defy Churchill, the British War cabinet and the Coalition leadership at home, and order the seventh division back home from the Middle East, and not allow it to be diverted to aid the collapsing British defence in Burma.

There is another great lesson in the story of John Curtin that is obvious to anyone who follows the tawdry contemporary political scene. As an accomplished, intuitive politician, Curtin knew when it was time to hold back, and when it was time to strike. It is a quality notably absent in the past decade of overweening ambition and colossal impatience of Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull.

Readers of history and geopolitics will be holding their breath: the first volume of John Curtin's War stops abruptly just four months after that fateful night of December 7, 1941, or about 40 months before Curtin's death in office.

John Curtin's War, Vol 1: The Coming of War in the Pacific and Reinventing Australia, by John Edwards, published by Penguin Random House, is being launched by former prime minister Paul Keating next week.

More than 10,000 people poured into the nation's capital on the ninth day of protests over police brutality, but what awaited them was a city that no longer felt as if it was being occupied by its own country's military.